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Topic: pizza sauce (Read 8136 times)

Well like I said this is the first time I have made your dough and the first time my dough has ever been that wet. Here is what happend.1. Once I added the water I turned on my mixer. But the mixer didnt do anything since it was so wet so I mixed it by hand with a spoon.2. Added the rest of the flour and tried the mixer again. This time it did mix some but it was so sticky the dough was sticking to the bottom of the bowl. So I would turn off the mixer and mix by hand just to get the dough unstuck from the bottom then I would turn the mixer on again.3. After the last rest period I turned the mixer on and it did alot better but it was still sticky. So I pulled all the dough out and put it in a bowl with a small amout of oil on the bottom and put in the freezer. Once out of the freezer it looked alot more like it should. The top was kind of hard since there was no oil on the top of the bough but it was a dough ball.

Does this sound right at all? will I just need to use a little more flour to shape the dough?

The first step of the recipe where you put half the flour and all the water in will make a very sponge like mass that is extremely sticky. I can see how your mixer would have problems. I always use a large wooden spoon for this step. Other than that it sounds about right, just make sure you kneaded the dough untill smooth.

If I recall correctly, Giovanni kneads his dough by hand. So he will always have better "control" over the dough than you will get with a stand mixer. With a stand mixer, and especially with a small amount of dough, you will frequently have to stop the machine to make adjustments: to get the dough ball off of the hook, to reorient the dough so that it kneads better, to scrape the sides of the bowl to get splattered flour or dough back into the game, to shape the dough into a ball because the machine isn't doing it well, etc. And there's nothing wrong with having a spoon or spatula on hand to help. One thing you might try in future efforts is to start with the paddle and then switch over to the hook when the dough looks like it is coming together. You might also start with some of the flour and a little of the water so that you don't immediately get a sticky mess. There's no real right or wrong way. Some recipes say to throw everything into the bowl at the same time (Peter Reinhart does this with his dough recipes), others say to start with the water (the Tom Lehmann approach) and then add the dry ingredients (all at once or in stages), and still others say to start with the dry ingredients and then add the water. With experience, you will figure out what works best for you and your particular machine.

As for your dough, you should have oiled the entire ball before putting it into the freezer/refrigerator to prevent the outer surface from drying out and forming a crust. If a crust does form, you can soften it a bit by rubbing a little bit of water or oil over the dried out area. Then cover the dough with plastic wrap or a towel to keep it soft until you are ready to work with it. If you find that the dough is still sticky when you are ready to work with it, you can add a little bit of flour on the work surface, as previously mentioned in an earlier post. But don't punch down and re-ball the dough. This will result in reorienting the gluten strands and make the dough overly elastic and hard to shape without experiencing snapback. It will also expel the gasses trapped in the dough.